358 
LIFE, IK ITS HIGHER FORMS. 
being, would have been called the threatening of suicide. 
Was it anything else in this Ape? Was not the act 
evidently the result of a process of reasoning, founded on 
his observation of the value his master set on him, and 
comprehending the sorrow which the supposed loss would 
produce? The cautiousness which determined that it 
should be only a deceptive loss was a refinement of intellect, 
almost human; it reminds us of that inimitable line of 
Burns’s — 
“ Sjnak o’ loupin’ owre a linn.” 
A kindred animal — the Siamang — shall afford ns an 
example of a mental principle very like conscience. The 
Dog and Cat, however, often display its workings as well. 
In Mr Bonnet’s “ Wanderings,” there is an account of this 
Ape, which he was keeping. In the cabin, there was a 
piece of soap, which had excited the Siamang’s cupidity, 
and for the abstraction of whioh he had been several times 
scolded. One day Mr Bonnet, while engaged in writing, 
happened to see the Siamang engaged in his thievish 
practices. “ I watched him,” says the observer, “ without 
his perceiving that I did so ; he occasionally cast a furtive 
glance towards the place where I sat. I pretended to 
write ; ho, seeing me busily engaged, took up the soap and 
moved away with it in his paw. When ho had walked 
half the length of the cabin, I spoke quietly, without 
frightening him. The instant he found I saw him, he 
walked back again, and deposited the soap nearly in the 
same place whence he had taken it; thus betraying, both 
by bis first and last actions, a consciousness of having done 
wrong. 
We shall close these anecdotes with a very touching one, 
